Presidential secret agent Lanny Budd is called back into action in post-war Germany as the Cold War begins
Since the age of thirteen, Lanny Budd has been more than an eyewitness to history. From the Paris Peace Conference to the Battle of the Bulge, he has played key roles in the extraordinary events of his age. Now, forty years later, Presidential Agent 103 is coming out of retirement to serve his country—and the free world—once more.
A counterfeiting conspiracy hatched by unrepentant neo-Nazis threatens to gravely damage America’s efforts to rebuild and stabilize a divided Germany. Lanny’s previous experience, as well as his unexpected connection to one of the chief conspirators, makes him the ideal operative to foil the sinister plot. But when he infiltrates the Russian-controlled sector, what Lanny sees makes his blood run cold. Communist leader and former US ally Joseph Stalin has twisted the socialist ideals he holds dear into weapons of tyranny, oppression, and terror. With the onset of a shadow war between two world superpowers, Lanny realizes that his mission is far from over.
The Return of Lanny Budd is the final volume of Upton Sinclair’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatization of twentieth-century world history. A thrilling mix of adventure, romance, and political intrigue, the Lanny Budd novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of the author’s vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.
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“These historical novels engulfed me in the thrilling and terrible imperatives of history…Sinclair’s historical acumen and his calculations about powerful institutions—government, press, corporations, oil cartels, and lobbyists—remain remarkably shrewd and often prescient.”
— New York Times, praise for the series
“Few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as human.”
— Time, praise for the series“When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Upton Sinclair’s] novels.”
— George Bernard Shaw, praise for the author“A great and well-balanced design…I think it the completest and most faithful portrait of that period that has been done or will likely be done.”
— H. G. Wells, praise for the seriesBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a journalist, a prominent social and political activist, and the author of over two dozen books, including the novel Dragon’s Teeth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. He is perhaps best known for The Jungle, the dramatic exposé of the Chicago meat-packing industry that prompted the investigation by Theodore Roosevelt that culminated in the pure-food legislation of 1906.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.